Saturday, 25 February 2017

Power, Alienation and Truth - Chaplin and Chomsky

Here are two excellent essays from the Jacobin site, just to cheer up your weekend. Firstly, a wonderful discussion by Owen Hatherly of Charlie Chaplin, and the early admiration of him and his politics by the Russian revolutionary film industry. Hatherly's work will be familiar to many readers of the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the London Review of Books. Here he reveals the contradictory and at times strange effects of the love of Chaplin displayed by film-makers such as Kuleshov, Barnet and Pudovkin, where pro-Bolshevism is wedded to the industrial-technocratic values of Taylorism and Fordism. This movement received the intellectual reinforcement of the great literary critic and theorist of literature as alienated language, Viktor Shklovsky, who saw in Chaplin's jerky movements a version of the actions of the industrial worker.

Moving from Shklovskian 'ostranienie' to a different form of alienation, Daniel Geary, a historian working at Trinity College Dublin, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Noam Chomsky's great essay 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals', first published in the New York Review of Books in 1967, at the height of America's war in Vietnam. Chomsky's essay, which would receive an even more formidable iteration in 1977 in his Huizinga Lecture, 'Intellectuals and the State', took the world of American policy-formulation as its subject and turned it inside-out, in the manner of all great critics: he presented American liberals with a radically alienated vision of the intellectual scene with which they had thought they were so familiar. This essay was essentially a manifesto for the extraordinary life of dissent which Chomsky has led ever since, and which he has always believed is open to any ordinary person endowed with some curiosity and a moral imagination. 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals' is reprinted in American Power and the New Mandarins, also published in 1967, Chomsky's first openly political book, and also the place where you'll find 'Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship', an overwhelming indictment of mainstream American social science and its complicity with the war in Indochina. 'Intellectuals and the State' is collected in another superb volume, published early in the Reagan era, Towards a New Cold War. Chomsky is not infallible, as Geary points out, but what a bracing example he offers to us all, as he nears his ninetieth year. Here is Chomsky's article, and then Geary's re-reading of it: